Zoho Contracts is a comprehensive platform that allows businesses to streamline the contract process, facilitating everything from contract signings to contract workflows and transition management during contract changes.
But how exactly does Zoho Contracts work in practice, and how does it benefit your business? Here’s how Zoho Contracts makes the contract management process easy and pain-free.
Simplify Contract Management with Zoho Contracts
Contracts are a big part of any business, but it’s how you manage them that’s important.
Generally speaking, businesses need a tight contract process to ensure nothing is overlooked and your business is protected—and picking the right contract management software is foundational to building a tight contract management process.
Zoho Contracts is purpose-built to save time and reduce errors by integrating cleanly with your CRM, facilitating close collaboration with sales, making redlining simple, and keeping your contract management tasks and terms centralized and up-to-date in a single location.
Not only does CRM integration help you avoid silos and improve transparency, but it may also improve sales cycle times by reducing delays between contract approval stages. When you integrate your contracting process into your CRM, you’re able to bring teams together—notably, your legal and sales teams—so that they can work collaboratively to the same end.
Contract Creation
Once your CRM is integrated with Zoho Contracts, there are a number of features you can take advantage of when creating your contracts.
Contract Templates That Save You Time
Zoho Contracts provides industry-standard contract templates that can be used out of the box or adapted at the advice of legal counsel—regardless of your business or industry size.
Because these templates have been legally reviewed, your contract teams can work more quickly to move contract workflows along (though it’s important to note that legal review by your company’s designated counsel is still appropriate to ensure they’re legally enforceable).
In addition, Zoho Contracts offers a standard clause library with template text you can simply copy and paste into your contracts—again, saving you time over manually writing your own language.
Contract Authoring to Limit Legal Liability and Improve Enforceability
Manually authoring contracts can be time-consuming and cost-intensive, as legal teams have to look out for language consistency issues that might otherwise leave them open to human error and unanticipated risks.
Zoho Contracts limits this liability through features that ensure language remains consistent across your documents. In addition, with Zoho Contracts, your contract authoring workflows benefit from the program’s simple user interface for building, editing, sharing, and reviewing contracts across internal teams and external users.
Contract Processing
Once contracts are created, additional features within Zoho Contracts help to streamline their processing.
Easy Approval Workflows that Reduce Errors
First, contract approval features in Zoho Contracts ensure all stakeholders get the chance to review a contract’s terms and conditions, as well as keep abreast of involved risks and opportunities.
Zoho Contracts also makes it possible for contract admins to create multiple approval workflows, associate them with different contract types, and assign approval processes to be completed before submitting contracts to prospects or clients.
Whether you set up a sequential or a parallel approval workflow, the approval process can be fully automated, reducing errors and saving time in getting contracts signed off.
Make Negotiations and Review Less Complicated
In the contract lifecycle, the negotiation stage is crucial. Whatever your negotiation strategy or process, it’s this phase that will set the tone of your relationship moving forward.
That being said, negotiations can be challenging to manage from a contracts point of view. With Zoho Contracts, you can negotiate entirely online, seamlessly manage redlining, view contract version histories, and even gain analytical insights into your negotiations. This both improves the quality of your negotiations and saves you time and resources in the process.
Transparent Obligation Management
Once your contracts have been signed and executed, it can be easy to overlook the issue of contractual fulfillment. Even with the most explicit contract terms—with all parties in agreement—if this process isn’t tracked and reviewed, contract breaches can occur.
With Zoho Contracts, obligation management becomes transparent. You can add obligations, check them off as they’re fulfilled, and review outstanding obligations as often as needed. You can also prioritize obligations, assign obligations to specific team members, and receive alerts and reminders to ensure obligations are being fulfilled.
A Less Frustrating Change Management Process
When any new contract comes into effect, managing its effects across the organization can be tricky. That’s why Zoho Contracts’ change management feature includes smart letter and activity-tracking capabilities, enabling parties to be notified of changes when they happen so that they can feel in full control of the process.
Reliable & Industry-Leading Data Protection
Finally, with government regulations such as GDPR and CCPA impacting the way organizations manage data, it’s imperative that they correctly manage any personally identifiable information (PII) captured during the contract process.
Zoho Contracts secures your stakeholders’ data, ensuring not only that data remains safe—a legal necessity—but that your relationship and trust remain intact as well. Its data protection feature helps your business avoid data breaches while also fulfilling your confidentiality obligations.
In Summary
Managing contracts is a critical fact of life for businesses, but it isn’t always an easy one from an operational perspective. With Zoho Contracts in place, you can rest assured that not only will you avoid the pitfalls of miscommunication, human error, and wasted time, but you’ll benefit from the program’s cost savings and the streamlining of your operations as well.
For more on how to implement and integrate Zoho Contracts into your CRM, reach out to the Zoho experts at ZBrains.
